AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger
A retired schoolteacher who bought a run-down hovel for $100,000 has discovered she landed the bargain of a lifetime: Experts have verified that her home was built by Frank Lloyd Wright.
According to The Associated Press, Linda McQuillen in Madison, WI, learned that her home, built in 1917, is an American System-Built Home—the famed architect’s first effort to bring high design to an affordable level for the masses. Factory-built and assembled on site, it is one of just 14 such homes still standing, and one of only 532 houses Wright built in total before his death in 1959.
So how’d this architectural gem go unnoticed? Well, for one, the 1,800-square-foot home had been sadly neglected. When McQuillen bought it in 1989, a tree was growing through the roof of the garage.
McQuillen cut down the tree, fixed up the house, and moved on with her life, blissfully unaware of the place’s true value. Until 2009, that is, when she received a letter from Mary Jane Hamilton—a historian who’d come across clues that the home was built by Wright. Later, an extensive tour of the home confirmed that Hamilton’s suspicions were right on the money.
And that makes McQuillen very happy.
“It does feel like a reward, a vindication that when I saw the house and could see beyond the disrepair that I knew there was something substantive,” she told the AP. “The house really spoke to me.”
And it’s not an isolated fluke, either: A few months earlier, a bungalow in a suburb of Milwaukee was found to be designed by Wright, who grew up in Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin.
Who knows? Maybe more Wright homes are hiding out there and just waiting to be discovered—so don’t judge a home by its state of disrepair.
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